Posted by: gcarkner | August 22, 2014
Captions of Europe in the Summer of 2014
Posted in Aesthetics
Posted by: gcarkner | August 22, 2014
Mind Expanding Quotes on a Fine-Tuned Universe & Biosphere
Scholarly Reflections on the Fine-Tuned Universe & Biosphere
Dr William Lane Craig’s talk at UBC on March 6, 2013: http://youtu.be/LtupHkRKimc
Noted Physicist Paul Davies asserts: “There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the Universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned’ for life.” Astronomer and mathematician Sir Fred Hoyle at Cambridge University was in complete astonishment when he discovered the resonance in the carbon atom, a basic building block of the biological life, and also discovered that carbon along with other heavy elements were made in the nuclear furnace of stars.
Barrow, John and Tipler, Frank. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Classic book dealing with almost all aspects of the Anthropic Principle, with extensive calculations regarding fine-tuning.
Carr, B. J., and Rees, M. J. (April, 1979). “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle and the Structure of the Physical World.” Nature, Vol. 278, 12 April 1979, pp. 605 -612. This is the first major article extensively discussing the way in which the constants of nature are set just right for life to occur.
Paul Davies (Physicist and Philosopher, Professor at Arizona State University): “Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth – the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient “coincidences” and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs (of which there are 40) must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile. Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn’t exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleus and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life.”
Amazing Facts 200 billion stars in our Milky Way home galaxy alone; 100 billion galaxies; 13.8 billion years of cosmic history. Cosmology fuels the bigger questions.
Posted in Apologetics, Public Lectures, Science Reflections, Seeker Corner | Tags: Fine-tuning
Posted by: gcarkner | July 28, 2014
Emerging Adults
Christian Smith Sociologist Notre Dame University: Souls in Transition
Current generation heavily influenced by a new religion which he labels Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
Christian Smith exposed the sub-cultural ethos of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) which he considers a new religion in America (exploitive of Christianity and Judaism). This outlook rules the minds and hearts of teens and young people 18-23 in huge numbers. This online article below is quite revealing and offers a serious concern for church and campus workers alike.
Something heretical lies at the level of deep structure in people’s thinking. It contains a defeater belief for orthodox Christian faith as we preach. Some think that it could be part of the explanation for the exodus (see the EFC report Hemorrhaging Faith pdf) of many teens (3/5) from the church after age fifteen. This is something to ponder and discuss: adolescents may have bought into a different religion ( a therapeutic mythology) while sitting in our pews and Christian education classes! Here’s a link. Christian Smith is a reputable scholar and expert on teen and young adult culture in North America, so he is worth attending to.
http://www.christianpost.com/news/moralistic-therapeutic-deism-the-new-american-religion-6266/
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
- A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
- God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
- The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
MTD is a revisionist faith, which colonizes established religious traditions like Christianity; it is parasitic on orthodoxy. It offers a divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness. Smith writes, “We have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of “Christiainty” in the United States is actually only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity’s misbegotten cousin Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” I’m going to look into it in more detail.
General American 18-23 Values from Souls in Transiition
- soft ontological antirealists
- epistemological skeptics
- perspectivalists (various ways to see this; mine is only one)
- in subjective isolation (my path)
- constructivists
- moral intuitionists (feel about a situation or decision)
Posted in Aesthetics, Apologetics, Faith & Culture
Posted by: gcarkner | July 25, 2014
Dawkins-Lennox Debate September 22, 2014
Dialogue for the Curious Cranium
Think Again!
Oxford Biology Professor Richard Dawkins
debates
Oxford Mathematician/Philosopher Dr. John Lennox
at UBC
- Monday, September 22 @ 4:00 p.m.
- Woodward IRC Room 6
This is a film of a recent debate followed by a panel discussion with
Dr. Dennis Danielson English Department UBC, and Dr. David Helfand, President of Quest University
Paper on Scientism as a Barrier to Knowledge by Dr. Gordon Carkner SCIENTISM:Apologeetics Canada
Some Quotes from Famous Scientists to Spark the Discussion Prior to the Debate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlR3bOsoAdA Alister McGrath, University College, London responds to New Atheism
“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence… Faith is belief in spite of, even because of, the lack of evidence…Faith is not allowed to justify itself by argument… Faith being belief that isn’t based on evidence is the principal vice of any religion”
~Richard Dawkins
“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
“Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
A Blogger’s Summary of Lennox’s Arguments about the nature of science and reality in God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? which responds to Dawkins. http://craigjosling.blogspot.ca/2012/05/summary-of-gods-undertaker-has-science.html
“The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world.”
Thomas Nagel Philosopher in Mind and Cosmos
“The common belief that . . . the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility is not only historically inaccurate but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability. “ ~Colin Russell, Historian of Science
“Note that I am not postulating a ‘God of the gaps’, a god merely to explain the things that science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain why science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains. The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order”.
~Oxford Philosopher Richard Swinburne
[The issue here is that, because God is not an alternative to science as an explanation, he is not a God of the gaps. On the contrary, he is the ground of all explanation: it is his existence which gives rise to the very possibility of explanation, scientific or otherwise.]
“Because there is a law of gravity, the universe can and will generate itself from nothing”.~Stephen Hawking and Mlodinow in “The Grand Design”.
Arno Penzias (Nobel prize-winning discoverer of the cosmic background microwave radiation): “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say “supernatural”) plan” (Cosmos, Bios and Theos, Margenau and Varghese eds., Open Court, La Salle III,1992 p.83).
“You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”. ~Francis Crick
“There is not the slightest shred of scientific evidence that life is anything other than a stupendously improbable accident. It’s often said that life is written into the laws of physics; well, it’s not – any more than houses or television sets are. It is consistent with those laws, but they alone will not explain how it came to exist….For a hundred years the debate has been dominated by chemists, who think it’s like baking a cake: if you know the recipe, you can just mix the ingredients, simmer for a million years, add a pinch of salt, and life emerges. I don’t think that is ever going to be the explanation, because life is not about stuff, about magic matter; it’s about a very special type of information processing system. And the whole subjects of information theory and complexity theory are very much in their infancy… A law of nature of the sort we know and love will not create biological information, or indeed any information at all. Ordinary laws just transmit input data into output data. They can shuffle information about but they cannot create it … I have come to the conclusion that no familiar law of nature could produce such a structure from incoherent chemicals with the inevitability that some scientists assert” (Paul Davies, op cit, p.20).
“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion beyond question” ~Cambridge astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, The Universe: past and present reflections (regarding the resonances in energy levels in H, Be and C).
Sir John Polkinghorne, for instance, himself an eminent quantum theorist, rejects the many-universe interpretation. “Let us recognise these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes. By construction these other worlds are unknowable by us. A possible explanation of equal intellectual respectability – and to my mind greater economy and elegance – would be that this one world is the way it is, because it is the creation of the will of a Creator who purposes that it should be so” (One World, SPCK, London, 1986 p. 80).
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered …is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind… is the Blind Watchmaker” (Richard Dawkins).
The tendency towards a pure reason or pure faith are really impossible to actualize; there are no pure domains of reason and faith. They are intertwined. One cannot get rationalism without the other extreme of fideism; both are forced categories; rationalism needs faith to be fideism for its very survival. Nietzsche claimed that there are only interpretations; positivists claim that there are only facts. What should we believe whatever our starting point or prejudgments? It is perhaps a life-long quest to understand the nuances of this relationship. Marquette intellectual D. Stephen Long helps our quest offering fresh insight and much to ponder in his profound bookSpeaking of God: theology, language and truth. Stephen was a past guest speaker at UBC in the GFCF series.
~Gord Carkner
See also posts within this blog on A Fine-Tuned Universe? and on Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies, Markers of Scientism
https://ubcgcu.org/2013/10/15/david-bentley-harts-provocative-take-on-naturalism/ David Bentley Hart comments on naturalism as an explanatory regime.
Key Insights from a Course by John Lennox Summer of 2014
- DNA is a language, a semitic code. It involves billions of bits of information (3.5 billion base pairs).
- Scientists are beginning to accept that there is a ‘singularity’ at the origin of life–they are giving up on a scientific transition from inanimate matter to biological life. The attempt to see how a chemical soup can emerge into life has failed. Emergence is not the answer. Evolution must start with biological life.
- Many top biologists (e.g. James Shapiro, William Provine, Robert Reid, Lima de Faria, Eric Davidson) are having doubts or second thoughts about the mechanism of natural selection. They are joined by atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel (Mind & Cosmos).
- Insight about Information in a System: information must be inputted; a biological system doesn’t create info; information is not physical or material. Structures that bear information cannot arrive by emergence.
Our Two Distinguished Panelists
Professor David J. Helfand, President and Vice-Chancellor, Quest University Canada; President, American Astronomical Society, Professor of Astronomy, Columbia University (on leave). He has spent 35 years as Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University, where he served as Department Chair and Co-Director of the Astrophysics Laboratory for more than half that time. He is the author of nearly 200 scientific publications on many areas of modern astrophysics including radio, optical and X-ray observations of celestial sources from nearby stars to the most distant quasars. He is engaged in a research project designed to provide a complete picture of the birth and death of stars in the Milky Way.
But most of all, David is an inspirational teacher, who received the 2001 Columbia Presidential Teaching Award and the 2002 Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. He has a deep concern about the state of the modern research university which he sees as dysfunctional, in part because of the impossibly large number of functions which the research university is expected to fulfill in 21st. century North America and in part because of the low priority given to teaching excellence. Because of these concerns, he has taken the radical step of pioneering a university dedicated to innovative teaching. David believes that he is a better cook than he is an astronomer and, ambiguously, colleagues who have sampled his gastronomic delights agree. We welcome him as a major public intellectual and a personal friend of many of us.
Dennis Danielson professor of English at the University of British Columbia, is a literary and intellectual historian who has made contributions to Milton studies and to the early modern history of cosmology, examining scientific developments in their historical, philosophical, and literary contexts. His books include Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (1982) and the Cambridge Companion to Milton (1989, 1999), both published by Cambridge University Press. His subsequent work in the history of astronomy, especially The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking and The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution, has engaged both humanities scholars and scientists in dialogue about the historical and cultural as well as cosmological meaning of Copernicus’s legacy. Danielson was the 2011 recipient of the Konrad Adenauer Research Prize from Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His new book Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution is in press and scheduled for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2014.
Further Reading on Science & Religion
Polkinghorne, Sir John, One World: The Interaction of Science & Theology. Princeton. (physicist/theologian—leading light on Science & Religion)
Polkinghorne, Sir John, Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science: Religion, Science and Providence.
McGrath, Alister. A Fine-Tuned Universe: the quest for God in Science and Theology. (Gifford Lectures)
Hutchinson, Ian. Monopolizing Knowledge.
Craig & Meister (eds.). God is Great; God is Good.
Gingerich, Owen, God’s Universe.
Collins, Francis, The Language of God. Free Press.
Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966.
Capell & Cook eds., Not Just Science: Questions Where Christian Faith and Natural Science Intersect. Zondervan
Jaki, Stanley, The Road to Science and the Ways to God. Chicago (Gifford Lectures on history of science)
Russell, Colin, Crosscurrents: Interactions Between Science & Faith. Eerdmans
Danielson, Dennis (ed.), The Book of the Cosmos. Perceus.
Plantinga, Alvin, Where the Conflict Really Lies: science, religion and naturalism. (a critique of the new atheist and the hegemony of Philosophical Naturalism)
King’s College Cambridge
Lewis, C.S., Miracles. Macmillan (a classic)
Waltke, Bruce, “Gift of the Cosmos” (article on Genesis 1:1-2:4) Chapter 8 in An Old Testament Theology, Zondervan, 2007.
Alexander, Denis, Rebuilding the Matrix: Science & Faith in the 21st Century. Zondervan (director of Faraday Institute in Cambridge, UK)
Burke, ed., Creation & Evolution: 7 Prominent Christians Debate. IVP UK.
Livingstone, D. N., Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter BetweenEvangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought.
Owens, V.S., Godspy: Faith, Perception, and the New Physics.
Gingerich, Owen, “Let There Be Light” article on natural theology by America’s top Christian physicist at Harvard’s Smithsonian Institute.
Theology of Creation
Alexander, Denis, Evolution or Creation?: Must we Choose?
Capon, R. F., “The Third Peacock” in The Romance of the Word. Eerdmans
Gunton, C., The Triune Creator: a historical and systematic study. Eerdmans (English theologian)
Walsh & Middleton, The Transforming Vision. IVP (on Christian worldview)
Bouma-Prediger, S., For the Beauty of the Earth: a Christian vision of creation care. Baker Academic, 2010.
Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos.
Limits of Science
Medawar, P., The Limits of Science.
Schumacher, E.F. A Guide for the Perplexed. Abacus. (brilliant challenge to ontological reductionism)
Carkner, Gordon, Unpublished paper: “Scientism and the Search for an Integrated Reality” (several posts from this on the Blog)
McGrath, A. & J., The Dawkins Delusion? IVP 2007.
Lennox, John. God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Lion Books, 2011.
Jeeves & Berry, Science, Life, and Christian Belief. Apollos Books.
Ward, Keith, Pascal’s Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding.
Harper, Charles Jr. ed., Spiritual Information: 100 Perspectives on Science and Religion. Templeton Foundation Press.
Spencer, N. & White, R. Christianity, Climate Change, and Sustainable Living. SPCK, 2007.
See also DVD Series called Test of Faith from Faraday Institute in Cambridge, UK
Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, GCU Events, Public Lectures, Science Reflections, Seeker Corner | Tags: Debate on God, God & Biology
Posted by: gcarkner | July 14, 2014
Negotiating Postmodern Thought @ UBC
Why is postmodernism a good thing for Christian graduate students? Cornel West writes that “truth-claims about descriptions in science and religion are contextual, and for Christians, ‘Truth-talk’ precludes disinterest, detachment, and distance because Jesus Christ is the Truth, the Truth which cannot be theoretically reified into a property of an abstract description, but only existentially appropriated by concrete human beings in need.” Rather than having to shoehorn Christianity into our academic work in a way that presents some parochial Christian idea as The Right Way to Think About X, we have the freedom to approach our work joyfully as an outgrowth of our position as followers of Christ.
The applied linguist Suresh Canagarajah notes that postmodernism or post-positivism in the social sciences is hospitable to those with strong political or religious commitments because it unsettles the “old platform” of scientific inquiry, calling into question constructs of rationalism, objectivity, empiricism, disinterested knowledge, and so on. On the other hand, Canagarajah also writes: “postmodernism has only limited uses for me as a philosophical paradigm. I am prepared to abandon postmodernist discourses when my spiritual walk reveals richer orientations that illuminate faith and life better.” Read More…
Posted in Grad Student Strategies
Posted by: gcarkner | July 8, 2014
After Nihilism: Towards an Incarnational Outlook
Go Past Nihilism and Find a Better Orbit
As we move beyond nihilism, we long to see culture reformed, heritage maintained, lives made whole, identities brimming with meaning. From one perspective, we want our full humanity back; we want the big picture on who we are, where we are and what our potential is. What is the discourse that can locate this renewal? Is it to be found in the language of incarnational humanism, an ancient tradition with many modern scholarly advocates? Language is an important means of God’s prophetic engagement with humans, the infinite in communion with the finite, all the while expanding the horizons of the finite. There is a profound significance about the Creator in dialogue with his creature, with his creation. We see this communication writ large in the incarnation; it is astoundingly important and yet often neglected today. How else can we engage agape love and the goodness of the divine in the fullest sense? It is a great gift (a bridge) to us humans which is meant to draw us upwards into a new dimension of life, a new caliber of thinking, finding a new centre to orbit around.
D. Stephen Long does an excellent effort of showing this complexity and nuances of this outlook in his important book God Speaking.
The certainties which the church has received as a gift require its participation in humanity’s “commom struggle” to attain truth. The human search for truth, which is philosophy’s vocation, is not set in opposition to theology’s reception of truth as gift. What we struggle to understand by reason we also receive by faith. No dichotomy exists between the certainties of faith and the common struggle by human reason to attain truth .… The truths humanity seeks by common reason (philosophy) and the certainties of faith can be placed over against each other such that each illuminates the other and renders it intelligible until the two ultimately become one, which is of course what the incarnation does in reverse. The concretion of the one Person illumines the natures of both divinity and humanity. (D. S. Long, God Speaking, p. 87)
Hermeneutic philosopher Anthony Thiselton says that the mystery of the incarnation is too profound for human discovery alone; it requires transcendent revelation and interpretation. Read More…
Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Seeker Corner
Posted by: gcarkner | July 2, 2014
Words to the Curious: Gord’s Summer Reads
Words to the Curious: Summer Reading Possibilities for Cranial Inspiration
Who doesn’t want to read a stack of good books this summer? I’ve tried to offered a variety: spanning devotional to world affairs with some supercharged theology in the mix: excellent scholarship, the prophetic voice and people who brave the spiritual journey towards intimacy with the divine. Nihilism does not have the last word.
~Gord Carkner
Posted in Faith & Culture, Prayer & Spirituality, Seeker Corner | Tags: Summer Good Reads
Posted by: gcarkner | June 7, 2014
Religious Discernment 101
It doesn’t matter what you believe; all religions are basically the same?
This is certainly a common sentiment, promoting tolerance and respect for difference. This is often the discussion in the clever TV show Little Mosque on the Prairie. One also notices such an exploratory sentiment in the movie Life of Pi. The trouble is, it’s a naive statement that lacks gravity and plausibility. It trivializes some of the most important discussions of our time. What a person believes about the ultimate meaning of life matters infinitely, especially to them. It also trivializes the Big Life Questions of purpose and meaning. Believers at least recognize the differences and their significance for how life is lived. They often risk torture and death for their beliefs, especially if they refuse to bow to an oppressive political regime which may not favour their religion. They quite literally stake their lives on these beliefs; that’s not trivial at all.
But are these believers mistaken? Does it really not make any difference what you believe? Are all religions at bottom the same? Is John Hick and other religious relativists correct after all, i.e. that plurality of cultures and religions within our globalized world means that pluralism (the ideology) is true? Has our late modern world trivialized truth too much for us to discern these issues?
Undoubtedly, there is much common ground between religions. Many accept a Creator and have some story of origins, plus a notable figurehead, a great or wise person with unusual insight, someone who can gather a significant following. All have a sense of good and evil, and a quest for peace.They want to solve an existential human problem. There is often a search for enlightenment or truth about oneself and the world–the meaning question. They try to answer why we suffer at some level. Most foster worship and teach an ethic for living well, being responsible for one’s family and respecting one’s neighbour’s interests, concern for the poor. There are indeed many similarities; few would question that claim. There is also much that is good in most religions [We say this while knowing that there exists also bad religion which deceives, exploits and oppresses the individual, steals her freedom or livelihood, splits up families, takes advantage of the naive].
But the similarities are by no means complete. In fact, the differences are quite staggering upon further investigation. Take conceptions of the divine, for example. While Buddhism prefers the emptiness of Nirvana to any positive or definite idea of God, tribal religions are polytheistic, believing in many gods, like the ancient Greeks and Romans. And in between, we have everything from the impersonal Brahman of Hinduism to the intimate personal Lord of Christianity. And of course we have the fundamentalist Neo-Atheists (Dawkins, Dennet, Harris et al) who claim that God and religion is irrelevant and probably even harmful, a promoter of violence; science is all we need and all we can trust. There are also different analyses of what is lacking in the world (the brokenness within the human condition) and how this can be redeemed, repaired, or addressed effectively. There is a common quest, but different solutions, to fix us humans, a sense that we still have a long way to go, both in our character and identity development.
A further example is the Christian idea of the incarnation. That God bent on revealing himself to us entered history as a human being is a claim unique to the Christian faith, but it is absolutely essential to the integrity of that faith. Other religions might claim temporary manifestations of deity as an avatar or angel from time to time. Christianity alone rests on the assumption that God literally became man for our human identification, affirmation of the human journey, and salvation from self-harm or harm by others. If supernatural aid for our current problems is available, that is significant indeed; it ought to capture our attention and stimulate our imagination.
Are these beliefs all the same? One could hardly say that. They are at variance with each other: they are even contradictory on many points. They might conceivably all be wrong, but we fear that they cannot all be right on all points. The common thing is the spiritual quest for all humans. But here is the basis for dialogue: to understand and appreciate each other on campus. We are here at university from all round the world and from a grand diversity of religious atheist ideology backgrounds; we ought not settle for stereotypes but ask our friends what they actually believe and why. Learn from and respect your laboratory and research neighbour. Listen hard to what motivates and empowers them ideologically, religiously. Perhaps even take a comparative religions course.
We conclude that it does matter very much what you believe. Otherwise, let’s face it, we are shallow and anti-intellectual, unwilling to learn from someone different from ourself . All religions make strong exclusive claims; if one drills below the surface, each one believes they have the truth on many matters and the purpose of our existence. We need to examine these claims to determine which are true, which are most plausible. This can be a fun and enlightening exercise, stimulating you to understand your belief better and more critically. Considering that the majority of our world’s population espouses some faith, this is not trivial at all. Let’s keep the conversation going!
~Gord Carkner, PhD Philosophical Theology
Reference: Eerdmans Handbook on the World’s Religions; JND Anderson, The World’s Religions. See also the post called Dialogue on Worldviews, and the series on Moral Relativism. David Bentley Hart has some brilliant quotes on the natural and supernatural as well.
The religious relativist, while claiming to take every religion seriously, does not take any religion seriously. He does not appreciate what is at stake in religious disagreements. –Dr. Jay Newman, Philosopher University of Waterloo
See also Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: a very short history. (OUP 2015)
Posted in Apologetics, GCU Personality, Seeker Corner | Tags: religious discernment
Posted by: gcarkner | May 22, 2014
We Want Our Humanity Back
Recovering Our Humanity Involves a Courageous Moral Stance and Content
New 2018 Book Release on this theme: Craig M. Gay, Modern Technology and the Human Future: a Christian Appraisal, IVP Academic.
There are many forces in the world today that would seek to steal our humanity, our innocence, our dignity and self-respect, our higher calling in life, our good reason, our good faith, our deeper sense of purpose. There are forces that seek to dismiss our connection with a moral robustness and a transcendent horizon of meaning, seek to dumb us down. We are tempted to sell out to the cheaper definitions of the human experience, to live a trivial existence of narcissism and radical self-interest–the prideful consumer. At the end of the day, these cheap versions are lies and smokescreens, keeping us form deeper insights and wisdom of the ages. They set us up for a spectacular fall, prevent us from reaching our better self. People should not settle for cheap versions of humanity; they should expect and demand a full and whole humanity and pursue a thick self. Don’t miss the profound quotes at the bottom of the article, especially those from Abraham Heschel.
But who would deny that humans have ethical capacity and are skilled at apprehending the good and the true? There is often disagreement about ethical foundations but not this fundamental capacity to make ethical choices and reflect as ethical beings. From a materialist perspective it may seem enigmatic, but nevertheless a real phenomenon as noted by Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. This is quite amazing for any animal. Without this critical ability, one could not expect good science or good relations among scientists, let alone justice and fairness of opportunity within an academic institution, a courtroom or a society. Science would be bankrupt without a tremendous amount of trust, critical thinking and peer review accountability. This is all about ethics and normative expectations; truth and goodness are both operative.
Nor is this moral capacity simply a mere product of evolution, although biologists such as Jeffrey Schloss at Westmont College are working on the evolution of altruism. The moral dimension of our humanity cannot be properly reduced to a survival issue or self-propagation. All humans by choice and desire participate in a quest for truth and struggle with their grasp of the ethical (except for psychopaths or sociopaths), the just, and the fair. Both truth and love are together needed for genuine knowledge according to the late Wittgenstein. [1]
In my PhD work, I was delighted to discover the deep genius of philosopher of the self Charles Taylor at McGill University. According to Taylor’s important tome Sources of the Self, [2] people are deeply embedded as moral creatures and universally have some relationship to the good; they cannot escape their moral capacity, behaviour or moral desires. They cannot escape being moral interpreters and interlocutors. I wrestled much with his position on the moral subject in my critique of Michel Foucault’s concept of moral self-constitution, which was rooted in radical freedom. Taylor, Canada’s premier philosopher, has many important things to offer to this philosophical anthropology conversation. You can read more about the parameters of his position in the GCU blog posts entitled ‘Quality of the Will’. Read More…
Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Seeker Corner, Stewardship | Tags: Recovering Humanism
Posted by: gcarkner | May 7, 2014
Paul Ricoeur: Une Grande Pensée
Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) was a French scholar widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. He is best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. In 2000, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory.
The major theme that unites his writings is that of a philosophical anthropology. This anthropology, which Ricoeur came to call an anthropology of the “capable human being,” aims to give an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives. Though the accent is always on the possibility of understanding the self as an agent responsible for its actions, Ricoeur consistently rejects any claim that the self is immediately transparent to itself or fully master of itself. Self-knowledge only comes through our relation to the world and our life with and among others in that world.
In the course of developing his anthropology, Ricoeur made a major methodological shift. His writings prior to 1960 were in the tradition of existential phenomenology. But during the 1960s Ricoeur concluded that properly to study human reality he had to combine phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. For this hermeneutic phenomenology, whatever is intelligible is accessible to us in and through language and all deployments of language call for interpretation. Accordingly, there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms. This hermeneutic or linguistic turn did not require him to disavow the basic results of his earlier investigations. It did, however, lead him not only to revisit them but also to see more clearly their implications. Read More…
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